A chance meeting with my old friend Kev Nickells, who styles himself Hákarl, led to this swiftly done collaboration. Kev laid down a drone, then improvised over the top with his fretless guitar, then removed the drone and gave the recording to me. My brief was to make a new drone, which I did, and Kev liked it. And then it got played on Repeater Radio with similar collaborations Kev made with Greta Pistaceci and Drift of Signals. Very pleased with this, it’s the last part of the radio show, but you should listen to all of it.
James and I have started to do some more Muster stuff. We went to the lovely OneCat studio in Crystal Palace and Jon Clayton made some recordings of us. We usually only play together at gigs as we live in different cities, so playing together is complicated. It felt less pressured than playing to people, and in many ways more enjoyable. Although playing to other people provides a useful framing to what we do, and keeps me focussed, its not always my favourite place to be.
The recordings sound great, and there will likely be a release of some kind in the future.
We’ve also got a couple of shows coming up. First, James is organising one at the Hundred Years Gallery in Hackney. Nine players will be playing in various combinations, all people James works with. Not strictly a Muster show, but a related incident.
The second is Avant Garden organised by Adam Brett, the gig is at Brockwell Park Community Greenhouses in Brixton on 1st October. We get to play in a greenhouse!
Andrew and I completed our residency at Rose Hill Arts last November. We enjoyed the residency immensely and are delighted with the piece we produced, which we performed at the end of 2022. The live show featured Dr Geoffrey Mead, a local historian who we consulted with on the piece, and who gave a series of vignettes on the history or the area around the Rose Hill as part of the performance. The Rose Hill is releasing it on their record label in early 2024.
We are both members of the Spirit of Gravity collective, so when a slot came up at the April show we were able to put ourselves forward to play a shorter version of the piece. We performed it at the Rossi Bar, Brighton, on 6th April. Jim Purbrick (Alien Alarms) filmed the show. Jim records all the Spirit of Gravity shows and always does a great job, so its worth giving it a watch if you have the time.
A few years ago I did a new soundtrack for 2 films by Chris Marker. I’ve always liked the work and wanted to return to it, so when we were planning the Spirit of Gravity 21st birthday party at The Rose Hill I thought I’d give it another try.
The show went well – not just for me, all the sets where brilliant, especially ones by ex-Asian Dub Foundation bassist Dhangsa, Fallow, and Lara Rix-Martin aka Meemo Comma. I got a great recording of my set courtesy of Abraham Moughrabi and put it on my Bandcamp page with a lovely sleeve designed by Bea, my daughter, who I also collaborated with on Four Walks at Old Chapel.
The Rose Hill is a venue, studio complex and creative hub run by musicians and artists and is one of my favourite venues to play at. Before its current incarnation it was pub I used to hang out in with my mate Matt before watching the football.
My friend Andrew Greaves and I had an idea for a work called Inside journeys which would explore the history and physical presence of a space and we approached The Rose Hill to see if they would be interested. We were delighted when they said they where, and even more delighted when they asked us if we would like to be part of their residency programme.
The audio sources and ideas for Inside journeys will be sourced by making recordings in the space of small solo performances, recordings of soundings of objects we find, and field recordings made over the course of the residency. We will also be sourcing historical recordings and any kind of sound ephemera we can lay our hands on, including sheet music relevant to the space and archive recordings. The residency will culminate in a performance of the work on Thursday November 17th 2022.
The Safehouse collective are a group of improvising musicians based in and around Brighton. They’ve been putting on shows of freely improvised music for many years and I was very pleased to be asked to take part in a the online wildcard sessions project they started during lockdown.
They randomly put people in groups of three and each trio shares files to make a new piece of improvised music. I got involved in session 5 and was really please when Corey Mwamba played a track I was on during his Freeness show on BBC Radio 3.
Session 6 saw me working alongside Paul Dalloway & Rachel Cohen, Dave Allen & Jamie Clark, and Jane Perkins & Matt Finucane. You can hear all 28 tracks here:
A big thank you to Dave Allen and Gus Garside for organising it.
I’ve been working out a new live setup using Automatism on my laptop, a collection of effects pedals and a contact mic’d metal tray + various objects.
I’ve played 3 shows since venues started opening up again. The first was Spirit of Gravity in October, second was with James O’Sullivan as Muster at the 100 Years Gallery in London with the excellent Shark Calmer, and finally at Splitting the Atom in Brighton.
It felt great to be playing live again, and it was good to hear the new setup through a big pa when I’ve been listening to everything on studio monitors and headphones for the last 18 months!
Thats it for 2021. I’ve released 2 albums during the pandemic, re-designed my live set up, and used it 3 times at live shows. Not bad really.
Four walks at Old Chapel got its fair share of attention. It got played on the radio and had a few reviews, all of which were really positive. Including, I think, this one from Blow Up, an Italian music magazine, although I haven’t had a proper translation yet and it does mention Deliveroo so who knows. That is Bob on the cover so I’m in good company.
It is a most enjoyable release, of musique concrète proportions, but Powell created something quite playful. It is not about some strict rules of composition, nor does it rely too much on granular synthesis as his more serious peers would do. With Powell’s version we hear the field recordings as they were when committed to tape, we hear the cracking and rubbing upon objects, and we encounter small transformations of this, set in a more performance setting, which adds a delicate live electronics feeling to the music.
Graham Dunning played a track on his show on NTS which I was very pleased about, I had some US college radio play, Radio 3 in Spain layed a track on a late night mix, and I was supported by many friends in the UK, including Spirit of Gravity, Lost Property, and Space is the Place.
_am_ by Muster got a few good reviews and plays and we’ve sold some copies but there are plenty more available. Here’s a review by John Eyles in All About Jazz.
Heard blindfolded, one would not immediately say that the music was produced by two players, as the duo produce a rich soundscape full of variety and interest.
Given the abstract nature of my work I don’t expect lots of plays and reviews, but when I’ve spent a couple of years on a project its good to think that other people will be able to hear it.
We’ve been visiting Old Chapel Farm, near Llanidloes, since 2011 and its a special place for all of us. Fran and Kevin, who run the farm, have become friends, and people whose commitment to a way of living we have the utmost respect for. This is how they describe what they are trying to do:
At Old Chapel Farm we endeavour to live close to the land – growing our food, tending livestock, practising ancient crafts, living together, celebrating the seasons in their passing.
On our trip in 2018 my daughter Bea and I collected objects we found around the site and gathered them together in a straw bale hut suspended over a stream in a wooded valley which the farm’s owners made available for us to use. We recorded small performances with them, brushing, scraping and rubbing them to produce a wide range of intimate sounds. We also made field recordings around the site, including using a piano which had been exposed to the elements for some time.
Back in the studio in Brighton, I arranged the recorded sounds into a new work. I wanted to try and communicate some of the mystery and revelation I’ve experienced on my visits, and the connections I feel with the land and people I encounter when I visit the farm.
I’m pleased that Crónica agreed to release the work, and Miguel Carvalhais from the label did a brilliant job mastering it and making a sleeve. It will be released on May 11th as a limited edition cassette, and is available now on pre-order.
Absolutely delighted that the new Muster album is out in the world! _am_ was partly recorded at the excellent Horse Improv Club in 2019, back when we were still able to do gigs, and partly recorded during the pandemic via a series of tape swaps. Paul Khimasia Morgan was kind enough to put it on Slightly Off Kilter as a download, and its also available as a CD in a beautiful hand screen printed sleeve designed and made by Sito Press.
The last track is the Horse recording and was taped live by Saint Austral Sound. The remaining tracks are the product of a distance collaboration during lockdown with each of us submitting an improvised track which the other digested over successive listens before recording a response. The two tracks were then mixed together and edited.
Dan Powell 